Read This: Learn Just Enough to Get Laid

You can’t really just read a book and expect to have more sex; if it were that easy, none of us would even bother to own a TV.

But some of the knowledge dropped in the pages of Learn Just Enough to Get Laid ($9) can certainly help. Authors Tyler DeAngelo and Brad Emmett don’t necessarily tell us anything we couldn’t learn using Google, but they do save us the time of finding all that info — and then they present it all in easy-to-read, funny prose broken up into lots of quick-hit passages complemented by plenty of illustrations.

The book focuses on eight areas of get-laid knowledge: guitar, wine, cooking, French, astronomy, religion, construction, magic. For each area, the authors divide the progressive levels of expertise into “Not Quite Enough,” “Almost Enough,” “Just Enough,” and “A Sure Thing.” Sometimes that structure works, sometimes it doesn’t; the Sure Thing level of astronomy is having a very basic level of knowledge about astrology. For one thing, astrology is not astronomy. For another, women want men to be men, not to be able to tell them what it means when Mercury is in retrograde.

That said, understanding that a Sauvignon Blanc complements spicy food and shellfish, or knowing how to remove a ring from a sink drain, or being able to strum the basic chords to “Jane Says” will definitely earn you points. (Whether performing a French Drop coin trick will do the same is, ahem, a coin toss.)